Leo

I've done four kinds of work: lecturing at a university, building products at a Fortune 500, investing my own capital, then running my own company. In that order, and not by design. Looking back, the one thing connecting them is that I keep looking for ways to make the sentence "I think this will happen" cost me something.

In 2016 I was a PM at the Fortune 500 when I stumbled across Bitcoin and read everything I could find, including the white paper five times. Before that I was at a university, living through the long tail of 2008, watching friends in export and foreign trade lose their jobs in batches. Those two things landed on top of each other, and I've been unusually interested in where money comes from — and how quickly it can stop coming — ever since.

Each of the four jobs gave me something different. Teaching: if you can't explain it, you haven't thought it through. The corporate job: how many layers a decision has to pass through before it reaches a production line — you only need to see that once. Investing is harsher: every opinion has to carry a number. Founding is harshest of all, because every lesson you skipped gets invoiced at once. So when I look at a company, I start with how it actually survives, then the numbers, and only then the story.

What I'm working through lately: turning valuation and macro workflows into things that can be run again and again; re-examining branding and cross-border trade, where my years in overseas tenders for medical devices turned out to be more useful than I expected. Crypto is still on the list, but it's one line on the list now, not the whole page.

This site holds three things: what I write (mostly first published on Paragraph), what I build, and the agent skills I've turned my analysis habits into. The third one is the newest — an article is finished the moment you publish it, whereas a skill gets run again, and writing one forces me to make the workflow explicit.

• University lecturer If you can't say it clearly, you mostly don't know it yet.
• Fortune 500 · Product How many layers a decision crosses before it touches a production line — you don't forget seeing it.
• Investor An opinion without a number attached is just conversation.
• Founder / CEO Every tuition fee you skipped, billed in one invoice.